Me—TIME person of the year? It has taken a couple days for this news to sink in. Yes, no joke, TIME Magazine has named me—and every other blogger—person of the year. Talk about riding a wave; I haven’t even been blogging for a year yet! Of course, I can’t take all the credit for this honor, since I share it with literally millions of other bloggers and internet creative types. Along with bloggers, TIME mentions open source software providers such as the increasingly popular Linux.
And why is TIME making such a big deal of all of this? The answer is that bloggers and open sourcers, according to TIME, have inaugurated a new era of the individual. Lev Grossman, who wrote the TIME article, sees this use of the internet—dubbed “Web 2.0”—as a “new tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.” Grossman goes on to declare Web 2.0 “a revolution,” one for which the world is ready. Grossman writes:
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.
Grossman rightly notes some benefits of Web 2.0. One such benefit is that community and collaboration can be good things. After all, humans are communal beings, having been created that way. Teamwork can be extremely productive and rewarding. As the old adage has it, “Two heads are better than one.” Community can be a great tool for productivity and innovation, but it also has its disadvantages, especially in a global community made up of people with differing beliefs and worldviews.
Grossman lauds Web 2.0 as “an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.” In this postmodern world, however, it seems that this “social experiment” may be doomed to failure. Without an external frame of reference for truth and morality, individual communities will not be able to see past their own horizons. Instead of ushering in a new era of understanding and community, Web 2.0 most likely will produce multiple communities rather than a single one.
Interestingly, while Grossman and TIME’s optimism regarding Web 2.0 knows no bounds, a recent BBC News article is considerably more skeptical. According to analysts at Gartner, “during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.” In addition, “the firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.” Apparently, by the middle of next year, everyone who wants a blog will have one. The BBC article appeals to Technorati, which claims that approximately 55% of the 57 million blogs it monitors are inactive. The blogging fad is nothing more than that—a fad. Just like pet rocks and macramé, Gartner projects that blogging will slowly fade into history.
So whom should we believe? Will blogging change the course of history, or will it peak and slowly dwindle away? Is blogging the beginning of a new utopia? Hardly. History—and the biblical doctrine of fallen humanity—tell us that utopias are elusive pipe dreams when left to humanity to produce them. Is blogging, then, just another flash in the pan? No one knows for sure. I seem to remember that analysts predicted that the PC would be doomed to failure, and that certainly didn’t happen. Blogging is such a recent phenomenon that any prediction about its future is premature.
What can be said is that blogging, just like the internet, can be a powerful tool for good or evil. Blogging may not change the course of history in a grandiose way, but for the time being, it seems to be a force to be reckoned with. What do you think?
Technorati Tags: blog, Time Magazine, open source, internet
As a fellow blogger, I must admit that I do believe blogging is a fad for the masses. In my personal opinion, academics, professional journalists, and other “wordy” types will continue to use this medium, but the “family blog page” and more popular uses will fall away with time.